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Former Secretary of Labor and university professor Robert Reich talks about the abrupt changes that took place when the Republicans gained control of Congress in the 1994 congressional elections. "I had to stop a lot of bad things from happening and guard my programs, make sure that decisions that had been made were going to stick," Secretary Reich recalls.

Dr. Ed McCabe, Chief of the Mattel Children's Hospital at UCLA, talks about the process he follows when a couple comes to him without a known history of disease or genetic red flags. Dr. McCabe explains that he begins with a very detailed family history, then considers other issues, including the age and ethnicity of the partners.

Professor of Law and Medicine Alex Capron talks about the ethics challenges that arise when drug companies do clinical research. One example that Professor Capron discusses concerns compensation that participating physicians receive from drug companies, tied to the number of patients they can enroll in a study.

Dr. Astrid Heger, Director of the Violence Intervention Program at L.A. County-USC Medical Center, talks about abused women who come into her practice. Dr. Heger explains that many of them come not so much to protect themselves, but to protect their children.

Philosopher John Searle points out the difference between computer simulations--be they of the brain or a weather event or an explosion--and the real thing. According to Professor Searle, however closely the simulation comes to approximating the appearance of the original, in the end what a computer simulation does is provide a picture of something, rather than an actual duplicate.

Former White House press secretary Mike McCurry recalls that his easiest days were those when there was only one topic on the mind of reporters in the White House press briefings. Mr. McCurry says his greatest challenge on those occasions was figuring out how to creatively say "no comment" every way imaginable. The hardest days were the "quiet" days when there was no single topic on everyone's mind. "And those were the very difficult days, because you had to be on top of sixteen different issues at once," Mr. McCurry says.

Former Secretary of Labor and university professor Robert Reich talks about what the United States can do to be more successful competing on the world economic stage. He says that rather than reducing wages to be more competitive internationally, the U.S. needs to increase worker productivity by improving worker education and training.

Philosopher Stephen Toulmin talks about Plato's preference for theories that take a mathematical form. Professor Toulmin adds that this preference was carried over to modern times, so that a discipline like psychology might be deemed inferior to theoretical physics. However, since the 1960s, Professor Toulmin explains, "...we've been moving back into something...more Aristotelian than Platonist...the difference being that we're quite open to the idea that different inquiries, different disciplines...are entitled to develop their own methods."

Nobel Prize winning professor of psychology Daniel Kahneman talks about the way people make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Dr. Kahneman explains that gambles have traditionally been described in terms of how much money will be won or lost, depending on the outcome of the gambling decision. He adds that this analysis has its origins in utility theory, which was developed in the 18th century.

Scientist and climate change expert Michael Oppenheimer talks about the consequences of acid rain in the lakes of southeast Canada and many states in the northeastern United States. "It leeches toxic metals, like aluminums, from the soils," Dr. Oppenheimer says, "and, as a result, many of these lakes that heretofore were able to sustain fish populations are now devoid of them."

Renowned oceanographer and geophysicist Walter Munk observes that spreading decreases the energy of sound as it travels. Energy loss due to spreading is proportional to the square of the distance from the source.

Professor of American studies and history Matthew Frye Jacobson talks about the contradiction between the growing labor needs of a rapidly expanding capitalistic society and a legal and political system which placed strict limitations on the degree to which many of the laborers could participate as citizens.

Renowned oceanographer and geophysicist Walter Munk talks about sonar, which stands for sound navigation and ranging, the process by which objects (like submarines, for example) are discovered when sound waves are reflected off of them and then detected.

Dr. Andrew Leuchter, Director of Adult Psychiatry at UCLA, talks about research that helps identify which patients are at highest risk for depression after a stroke. Dr. Leuchter explains that, ". . . It appears that strokes in the frontal portions of the brain, particularly in the left frontal portion, affecting some of the deeper structures in the left frontal lobe, put a patient at highest risk for having a depressive episode after a stroke."